invisible

I and my wife went for a salsa dance one February evening at GSR in Reno. They had Biggest Little Fur Con 2022.

I probably felt very normal that day... Will go again next year...

trooper

Staying at a most definitely non-chain motel in....Moriarty NM. (For a shooting competition in the area) We were asked to cooperate with a movie crew filming in and around the place... stay in the rooms between certain hours one evening ..that sort of thing. Filming went on and on and we were about to "mutiny" by the time it finally ended. Movie was "Hell or High Water" ... and once we were "released" we found Jeff Bridges sitting outside..and had a very pleasant chat with him. Poor guy looked utterly exhausted after the lengthy filming session (which involved quite a bit of running I believe). Have to admit I still haven't seen the movie... lol

lamphs

BDSM convention at the DEN Crowne Plaza about 4 years ago. I had a IRROPS stay. I witnessed a family about to check-in; the event changed their mind. A lot of people watching for me!

twb3

Not sure if this quite fits the thread. but the worst hotel experience was at an event held at a hotel that by coincidence had sold a number of rooms to some sort of youth sports event. Kids running in the halls yelling and screaming was bad enough, but they were repeatedly intruding in the meeting rooms our event had paid for and disrupting the presentations. Their coaches and parents were in the hotel bar getting drunk and couldn't be bothered. Hope I never have to share a hotel with any sort of youth sports group again.

DELee

Hell or High Water (film) - Wikipedia

David

halls120

We had just concluded a Scotland vacation, and decided to spend the night in a Heathrow hotel before catching our flight home.. We checked in, got our key, and headed for the elevator. Door opens, we are the only ones to enter, and we push our floor button. Just as the door begins to close, it opens and in walks a woman dressed completely in leather - knee high stiletto boots, leather dress with leather bustier, and a long leather coat. She smiled and said hello, and we returned the greeting. During the trip up my wife looks down at the bag our companion was carrying - full of leather cuffs, whips, and other "tools of the trade," and her eyes opened as wide as I've ever seen them. we reach her floor, and and our companion departs. The door closes and my wife said "did we just ride up with a dominatrix" and I busted out laughing, saying "now what could have possibly given you that impression?"

We still laugh about that, a decade later.

rsqrott

Not nearly as funny as some of these, sorry.
This falls under the heading of "most interesting" for me. I regularly stay in a HGI in Smyrna, TN when visiting our partners. Smyrna is a relatively small town roughly 1/2 hour outside of Nashville and this hotel is usually not overly crowded. The staff know me pretty well. One night after work I arrive at the hotel and it is absolutely packed. The bar/restaurant is rammed with people, the lobby is mobbed, I have never seen anything even close to this at the hotel. I ask one of the staff if this was for a wedding and she explained that a few years ago one of the Blue Angels had crashed while practicing maneuvers for the air show. The town raised the money to have a memorial put up in his memory and the memorial was being dedicated the following morning. So the hotel was full of his fellow Blue Angels and their families. I went to the dedication the following morning and it was both beautiful and heart wrenching. When the Blue Angels flew over the ceremony in the "missing man" formation I got chills. This is nothing that I ever would have sought out but it's an opportunity that I was so glad that I had.

The next morning while heading out of the hotel I slipped and was immediately surrounded by 4 Blue Angels in their jumpsuits offering to help me up and calling me ma'am. That's an experience that I could have done without .

mraju99

I seem to have a knack for encountering strange / fun / interesting conventions on my hotel visits. A few off the top of my head:

1. Had to overnight in PHL (I think) several years ago due to IRROPS and the only room my wife and I could find was in a small hotel a few miles away from the aiport. We walk into the lobby and there's a beauty contest in the conference rooms that was wrapping up. It was a feeder, I think city or regional, that eventually feeds into the state competition, so it was small but that made it more fun as we could actually talk to the contestants and get to know what these contests were like. Long story short, it's a rough life trying to slog your way through these small contests hoping to make it into the big ones...

2. Was in Tampa for a weekend of golfing with buddies and a coed fitness / bodybuilding convention was staying in our hotel. They were all quite friendly and fun to talk to but it was absolutely ego-crushing to hang out at the swimming pool in your swimming trunks around people who'd been prepping for the contests and gotten themselves down to <5% body fat. Couldn't even enjoy our dinners knowing how bad our guts would look the next day by the pool.

3. Have a buddy whose birthday happens to fall right around the AVN (the porn awards) weekend every year. We've gone to Vegas twice for his birthday and we actually avoid staying at the AVN hotel (It's usually at the Hard Rock), but we ended up hanging out at the casino at least one afternoon just for the people watching. Both the stars and the fans are great to watch. It's also probably the only time you can chat up a girl at the bar and say "You're really pretty. Have you ever done porn?" and not get slapped :-)

4. Speaking of Vegas, the hotels are so large that there's usually multiple conventions going on, and people tend to go to different hotels after the meetings. It always makes for interesting mixing of guests. One year, we were at the Cosmo and there was a police convention of some sort in the same place as the international weed growers association. To be fair to the hotel, the weed growers convention apparently was actually at Caesar's but all the attendees had come over to the Cosmo for dinner and drinks and didn't know about the cops there until it was too late. Thankfully a few drinks at the bar turned everyone into friends and no one (that we saw) left the place in handcuffs.

5. Finally, many years ago, I was in Honolulu with several good friends and we were having a great time. One night, we were walking down a tourist street that we had explored the night before. Except the previous night the street was just a normal street with bars and restaurants and regular tourists. Now, the street was absolutely jam-packed with what seemed like prostitutes of every type you could imagine. We first thought we must have walked onto the wrong street, but confirmed that no, this is the right street, and that's even the restaurant we were at the previous night. We finally asked a local what's going on and he replied "Don't you know? A ship docked this afternoon at Pearl Harbor."

Anyway, those were some of the more memorable encounters. The conventions I go to for my line of work are generally quite boring so it's always fun to run into people in vastly different walks of life. I find the easiest way to do so is simply ask the cabbies, on the way in from the airport, what are the best conventions in town this weekend, and they'll usually tell you right off the bat along with where they're staying. Then it's just a matter of hanging out in the right lobby bar and soon you're making new friends and swapping great stories :-)

Norri

I was in Vegas quite a number of years ago and was sitting at the bar with my GF (now Mrs Norri) she was admiring the coat that the lady next to her was wearing and they struck up a conversation, it turned out the lady and her husband had a "Porn Ranch" somewhere in the desert with dungeons and various other sets, I'm sure you can imagine, they gave us a card and said we should drop by some time.
Haven't got round to it yet. :-( for the next hour or so we were entertained with a string of porn stars stopping to say hello to our neighbours.
Fairly brightened up our time at the bar.

aroundtheworld76

The Hard Rock, which as of 2021 became Virgin, which seems kind of ironic.....

Fraser

Can't think of any conventions per se but on my first trip to NYC in 2002 I was staying at the IC Barclay which was hosting a lot of the players for the US Open (tennis) and the UN General Assembly too.

I flew in on Concorde and this old, slightly deaf guy in the Concorde Room at Heathrow asked me to wake him when the boarding was announced. Didn't realise until I got to the hotel that I saw the same guy later that afternoon, he was an umpire. The bell boy on arrival told me I'd just missed his last customer, Anna Kournikova (I guess he thought as an 18yr old guy I'd like that!). Later during our stay the whole hotel basically went into lockdown with lots of burly guys talking into their cuffs and the side street to the hotel was blocked off and we needed to show our keycards to get off Lexington/Park Avenues.

invisible

Just came back from the 'Biggest Little Fur Con'.
As a spectator, not as a participant.
Next year need to stay longer....

gaobest

I used to stay at crowne hotel in rosemont IL (ORD) for a trade show in the 90s & 00s. One year a horror movie convention took place in the hotel and horror fans were in my elevator. They told me that Robert Englund (nightmare on Elm street - Freddy Krueger) was the big star at the convention. Otherwise I�ve never had bigly noticeable hotel action.

Craig6z

Similar for me, although it was the National sales leaders recognition event, at the Fairmont in Dallas. The women were dressed in ball gowns, and it gave the vibe of a late 19th Century NYC debutant presentation event.

Also, was on a two-week extended stay at a business oriented Courtyard by Marriott in Marietta, GA when I discovered that on Saturday and Sunday their banquet/meeting rooms were being used for an S&M convention. While my colleague and I didn't formally "attend", we did manage to walk through the exhibit hall on Friday night, after the vendors had set up their booths. Lots of interesting (and very friendly) people roaming around the lobby when we returned from the work site on Saturday afternoon.

twb3

Neither qualifies as especially weird, but the greatest contrast I ever saw was in a hotel that was hosting an Amway meeting and a science fiction convention at the same time. I think it is safe to say there was zero crossover between the events.